[T]he parrhesia in social media may set individuals against one another in pointless struggles for authenticity while precluding them from uniting politically to fight for shared goals against those remote elites. The satisfaction of those games, the “self” and “truth” that emerges from those compulsions [...] make the present tolerable or even pleasurable while altering nothing about a general condition that makes people feel overburdened, depressed, precarious, excluded, humiliated. There is a pale satisfaction in making a limited truth in the moment, even if it has no effect on the distribution of power or the way one is known by society.

A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.

~Did I ever tell you I'm your hero? I am the subtext beneath your sling~
[Not work-safe. Don't read it out loud, anyway.]
While Nerve strives for intelligent, what about full-on intellectual erotica? I submit Foucault's Pendulous... at Suspect Thoughts. Not – at all – to be confused with Foucault's Pendulum, which oddly enough has its own bit of intellectual erotica in it that ties together the Khaballah, new pregnancy, and a woman telling her husband he's being an idiot, all at the same time.
posted by Su
on Sep 23, 2002 -
3 comments

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